A couple of years ago I began taking photographs of myself behind a sheet recording only my silhouette and shadow. I wondered if the transient faceless shapes captured by the photograph combined with a free-associative way of painting would be a visual way to address existential questions concerning the nature of being.

The photographs I took, which became the starting point of the painting, were concerned with the relationship of gesture to the individual: Does the gesture define the individual, or the individual the gesture? There being a limited number of gestures, does that make the gesture more unique than the individual? Would re-enacting a gesture of a figure in a painting from the 14th century evoke something from that time? Would it be possible to create a whole painting from the gesture of a single figure, as a novelist might create a story? By using a photograph of my silhouette/shadow, would I more easily be able to delve into my unconscious and gain a new awareness of the self?

I was not interested in painting the figure so photo-collage made the most sense in terms of allowing me to work abstractly. The mixed-media shaped and relief canvases became a way to balance image/object, virtual/actual and to cross the bridge from this reality to another. I incorporated letters in some of the pieces as a formal device to hold the space in which the image hovers and allude to the essentially elusive quality of the self.